Remain In Light on Ridiculously Bad Sounding Rhino Vinyl

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Talking Heads Available Now

UPDATE 2026

We reviewed this awful pressing shortly after its release in 2006. More proof, as if more were needed, that Heavy Vinyl collectors have lost their minds.

A more accurate formulation might be that such collectors can’t tell a good record from a bad one. If they could, the number owning this pressing would be a fraction of that seen below, as would the number who want it. Let’s take a deeper dive into the actual evidence for its desirability:

More than 10,000 Discogs members have this album, almost two thousand would like to own it, and the consensus is that it is an outstanding reissue, having earned a grade of 4.66 out of 5 from 735 members. (Don’t worry, I won’t show you what they had to say about it, but you are welcome to go to Discogs and read it yourself.

With an average price of 25 bucks, what is keeping those 1948 potential buyers from pulling the trigger? Seems affordable to me. Inflation has gone up 62+% since 2006, making the album cheaper than if you had bought it when it came out.

Our 2006 Review

The Rhino Heavy Vinyl reissue of this album was deemed dead on arrival the minute it hit my turntable.

No top, way too much bottom, dramatically less ambience than the average copy — this one is a disaster on every level.

Rhino Records has really made a mockery of the analog medium. Rhino touts their releases as being pressed on “180 gram High Performance Vinyl.” However, if they are using performance to refer to sound quality, we have found the performance of their vinyl to be quite low, lower than the average copy one might stumble upon in the used record bins. 

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The Mahavishnu Orchestra – Birds of Fire

More of the Music of The Mahavishnu Orchestra

  • This original UK import copy boasts solid Double Plus (A++) sound or BETTER throughout – it’s so smooth and natural you can turn up your volume pretty much as loud as you like and really let it blast
  • If you only own one Jazz Fusion album, you could hardly do better than Birds of Fire — It’s hard to think of another record that rocks as hard, and it’s not even a real rock record!
  • These early British pressings are very hard to find with quiet vinyl, and a lot of the ones that come from overseas are not in the condition advertised, making this a title that shows up on the site a great deal less often than we think it should
  • 5 stars on AllMusic and clearly one of the All Time Greats in the world of Jazz/Rock, as well as the band’s Masterpiece

This is the band at the peak of their powers and, no pun intended, on fire. This may be jazz, but it’s jazz that wants to rock. And on this copy, it rocks like you will not believe. The louder you play it the better it sounds.

Birds of Fire is one of the top two or three Jazz/Rock Fusion Albums of All Time. In my experience, few recordings within this genre can begin to compete with the dynamics and energy of the best pressings of the album — if you have the big dynamic system for it.

We find ourselves playing albums like Houses of the Holy and Zep II and Dark Side of the Moon for hour upon hour, with dozens of copies to get through, and we do it on a regular basis. If anybody knows “big rock sound,” it’s us. But can we really say that those albums rock any harder than this one? Birds of Fire is to Jazz what Zep II is to Rock — the ultimate statement by a band at the absolute top of their game.

The Best Copies

The main problem with this record is a lack of midrange presence. If the keyboards, drums, and guitars are not right in front of you,, your copy does not have all the presence it should. On the best copies, the musicians are in the room with you. We know this for a fact because we heard the copies that could present them that way, and we heard it more than once.

Which, of course, gets to the reason shootouts are the only real way to learn about records. The best copies will show you qualities in the sound you had no way of knowing were possible. Without the freakishly good pressings, you run into by chance in a shootout you have no way to know how high is up. On this record up is very high indeed.

Birds of Fire as a recording is not about depth or soundstage or ambience. It’s about immediacy, plain and simple. All the lead instruments positively jump out of the speakers — if you are lucky enough to be playing the right pressing. This is precisely what we want our best Hot Stampers to do. The better they do it, the higher their grade.

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Joni Mitchell – The Hissing of Summer Lawns

More of the Music of Joni Mitchell

  • You’ll find INCREDIBLE Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this early Asylum pressing
  • Lots of Tubey Magic, textured synths, big bass and breathy vocals – this copy brings Joni’s jazzy folky fusion to life
  • Check out the big bottom end on “The Jungle Line,” which features the Drummers Of Burundi
  • Who made a more original, forward looking and interesting album in 1975 than this? I can’t think of anyone, can you?
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Joni Mitchell evolved from the smooth jazz-pop of Court and Spark to the radical Hissing of Summer Lawns, an adventurous work that remains among her most difficult records [as difficult as it is brilliant] … a strange and beautiful fusion of jazz and shimmering avant pop.”

Both sides here are airy, open, and spacious, with plenty of ambience. The bottom end is tight and punchy throughout with good solid weight, and the top end is silky sweet. Many copies of this album have a phony hi-fi “glare” that made us wince, but the sound here is warm and natural.

After hearing a few copies that bored us to tears years ago we had pretty much given up on finding good sound for this album, but once we found some truly hot Hot Stampers we found ourselves really enjoying this sophisticated Jazzy Folk Pop music.

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The Jam – Setting Sons

More Rock and Pop

  • Setting Sons appears on the site for only the second time ever, here with STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades or close to them throughout this vintage Polydor pressing – fairly quiet vinyl too
  • Both of these sides have energy and presence that positively jumps out of the speakers, two of the qualities that we prize most highly in our Hot Stampers, and two of the things (among many) that Heavy Vinyl does so poorly
  • It’s the rare copy that’s this lively, solid and rich… drop the needle on any track and you’ll see what we mean
  • 5 stars: “Setting Sons often reaches brilliance and stands among the Jam’s best albums….”

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An Amazing Recording Held Back by Truly Awful Mercury Mastering

Hot Stamper Mercury Pressings Available Now

This Mercury 35mm recording was released through Philips after they’d bought the Mercury label back in the 60s.

Philips would go on to release the mostly dreadful Golden Import pressings that were made from all the most famous Mercury recordings, but of course they sounded a great deal more like Philips recordings than Mercury recordings once they had been remastered.

Some things never change. Do you like the sound Steve Hoffman brought to the DCC vinyl releases? You can be sure you will get plenty of that sound and very little of any other. We call that My-Fi. Once we learned to recognize it, something we admit took us longer than it should have, we became ardently opposed to it.

If you think that the right way to remaster records is to make them sound more like you want them to sound and less like the scores of vintage pressings sounded before, you and I are clearly in different camps. (One listen to a Hot Stamper pressing may be all that it takes to get you to switch camps.)

This album was recorded by Robert Fine and Wilma Cozart, then mastered by George Piros, all members of the legendary Mercury team, revered by the audiophile cognoscentias as true giants , and with good reason. We count ourselves among Mercury’s biggest fans.

It is instructive to note that the Philips mastering in this case is dramatically superior to the mediocre Mercury mastering by Robert Fine, which may strike you as counterintuitive, but is nonetheless a fact that cannot be denied once you have played a sufficient number of copies of each version, as we have.

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Peggy Lee – Ole ala Lee!

More Pop and Jazz Vocal Recordings

  • Here is an original Capitol stereo pressing with solid Double Plus (A++) sound from start to finish – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This copy is rich, full-bodied and Tubey Magical – we’re dealing with an All Tube Analog recording chain from 1961 after all – with present, sweet, breathy vocals, the kind that practically no modern Heavy Vinyl record can offer
  • “Velvety flutes, peppy percussion, well-behaved brass – yes, the stage is set once more for Peggy Lee’s sedately suggestive Latin musings. [T]his sequel to the singer’s Latin ala Lee! album offers another enchanting mix of jazz-vocal staples (“Come Dance with Me,” “You Stepped Out of a Dream”) and Broadway-issue mambo (“Fantastico,” “Non Dimencticar”).

Not to be confused with Latin ala Lee and its two toreadors.

This vintage Capitol pressing has the kind of Tubey Magical Midrange that modern records can barely BEGIN to reproduce. Folks, that sound is gone and it sure isn’t showing signs of coming back. If you love hearing INTO a recording, actually being able to “see” the performers, and feeling as if you are sitting in the studio with the band, this is the record for you. It’s what vintage all analog recordings are known for — this sound.

If you exclusively play modern repressings of vintage recordings, I can say without fear of contradiction that you have never heard this kind of sound on vinyl. Old records have it — not often, and certainly not always — but maybe one out of a hundred new records do, and those are some pretty long odds.

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Albeniz / Suite Espanola on Decca

More of the Music of Albeniz

  • With two seriously good Double Plus (A++) sides, we guarantee you’ve never heard Suite Espanola sound remotely as good as it does on this vintage Decca pressing – exceptionally quiet vinyl too
  • This is our best sounding Decca pressing – the best Londons will always win the shootouts we do, but the best Deccas can come close and sound truly amazing in their own right
  • The orchestral power on display is positively breathtaking – few recordings we know of are this dynamic and exciting
  • Wilkie’s Decca Tree recording is overflowing with the kind of clear, spacious, realistic sound that can only be found on the better vintage vinyl LPs
  • Performances and sound like no other – De Burgos’s Suite Espanola is practically in a league of its own

Wow, is this record ever dynamic! I would put it right up there with the most dynamic recordings we have played over the course of the last twenty five years. It also has tons of depth. The brass is at the far back of the stage, just exactly where they would be placed in the concert hall, which adds greatly to the realism of the recording.

Note that careful VTA adjustment for a record with this kind of dynamic energy is a must. Having your front end calibrated to this record is the only way to guarantee there is no distortion or shrillness in even the loudest passages.

What to Listen For

Clear castanets.

Big bass drum thwacks.

Crescendos that build to intense climaxes.

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The Biggest “If” in All of Audio

Hot Stamper Pressings of Large Group Jazz Recordings Available Now

The best of the best vintage recordings are truly amazing if you can play them right.

That’s a big if.  In fact, it may just be the biggest if in all of audio.

But that is not our story for today. Our story today concerns the relationship between more accurate timbre and higher fidelity.

What do we love about vintage pressings like the Ted Heath disc you see pictured above?

The timbre of the instruments is reproduced with wonderful fidelity.

The unique sound of every instrument in this very large ensemble has been recorded accurately. Every instrument sounds the way it would sound if you were hearing it live. Every instrument sounds real.

That’s what we mean by Hi-Fi, not the kind of “Audiophile Sound” (sneer quotes are very much called for whenever the word “audiophile” is used to describe sound quality, mostly because there is so little in the way of quality to be described ) that passes for Hi-Fidelity on some records.

Some of the worst offenders along those lines can be found here.

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Johnny Cash – Hello, I’m Johnny Cash

More of the Music of Johnny Cash

  • Hello, I’m Johnny Cash debuts on the site with solid Double Plus (A++) grades on both sides of this original Stereo 360 pressing
  • The vocal presence and freedom from coloration will put a very real sounding Johnny Cash front and center right in your very own listening room
  • Rich, smooth, sweet, full of ambience, dead on correct tonality, and wonderfully breathy vocals – everything that we listen for in a great record is here
  • 4 stars: “The energy that Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three captured on the legendary Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison live record can probably never be duplicated. That being said, Hello, I’m Johnny Cash comes very close, blending slow talking-blues songs with steam-engine-paced country rockers. This forgotten album may be one of the five best in the Cash discography.”

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How Is this Title Not on the TAS List?

Hot Stamper Pressings of Orchestral Spectaculars Available Now

UPDATE 2026

I wrote this commentary about ten years ago if memory serves. Since then we have done a number of shootouts for Slaughter on Tenth Avenue and have never failed to be impressed with the sound and the music.

Many of Arthur Fiedler‘s recordings are favorites of ours. We may even have a few on the site at the moment. All of them are guaranteed to satisfy.

This copy of  from many years ago was so good on side two it practically left me speechless.

I wondered: How is this title not on the TAS List?

Why is it not one of the most sought-after recordings in the RCA canon?

Beats the hell out of me.

But wait just one minute. Until a month ago I surely had no idea how good this record could sound, so how can I criticize others for not appreciating a record I had never taken the time to evaluate myself?

Which more than anything else prompts the question — why is no one exploring, discovering and then bringing to light the exceptional qualities of these wonderful vintage recordings (besides your humble writer and his staff, of course)?

HP has passed on. Who today is fit to carry his mantle into the coming world of audio?

Looking around I find very few prospects. None in fact.

But then again, I’m not looking very hard. I could care less what any of these people have to say about the sound quality of the records they play.

They all seem to like records that don’t sound very good to us, so why put any faith in their reviews for other records?

Reviewer malpractice? We’ve been writing about it since 1994..

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